100 things kids may never know about

Read this on Yahoo! and I agree with about 95% of it. At 31 there are a few things on there that I don't really remember.

 

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1) Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.

2) Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.

3) Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo.

4) The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.

5) Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.

6) Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.

7) High-speed dubbing.

8) 8-track cartridges.

9) Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.

10) Betamax tapes.

11) MiniDisc.

12) Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.

13) Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations.

14) Shortwave radio.

15) 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.

16) Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.

17) That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’

 

Computers and Videogaming

18) Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long.

19) The scream of a modem connecting.

20) The buzz of a dot-matrix printer.

21) 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.

22) Using jumpers to set IRQs.

23) DOS.

24) Terminals accessing the mainframe.

25) Screens being just green (or orange) on black.

26) Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.

27) Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.

28) Counting in kilobytes.

29) Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.

30) Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.

31) Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.

32) Joysticks.

33) Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.

34) Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.

35) Recording a song in a studio.

 

The Internet

36) NCSA Mosaic.

37) Finding out information from an encyclopedia.

38) Using a road atlas to get from A to B.

39) Doing bank business only when the bank is open.

40) Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.

41) Phone books and Yellow Pages.

42) Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.

43) Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.

44) Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.

45) Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.

46) Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.

47) Archie searches.

48) Gopher searches.

49) Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.

50) Privacy.

51) The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.

52) Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.

53) Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.

54) The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs.

55) The time before PC networks.

56) When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.

 

Gadgets

57) Typewriters.

58) Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?

59) Sending that film away to be processed.

60) Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.

61) CB radios.

62) Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.

63) Rotary-dial telephones.

64) Answering machines.

65) Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart.

66) Pay phones.

67) Phones with actual bells in them.

68) Fax machines.

69) Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

 

Everything Else

70) Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.

71) Remembering someone’s phone number.

72) Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.

73) Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.

74) Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.

75) LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.

76) Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.

77) Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.

78) Neat handwriting.

79) The days before the nanny state.

80) Starbuck being a man.

81) Han shoots first.

82) “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen Episode III, so it’s no big surprise.

83) Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.

84) Trig tables and log tables.

85) “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”

86) Finding books in a card catalog at the library.

87) Swimming pools with diving boards.

88) Hershey bars in silver wrappers.

89) Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil to break off the first finger.

90) A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).

91) Having to manually unlock a car door.

92) Writing a check.

93) Looking out the window during a long drive.

94) Roller skates, as opposed to blades.

95) Cash.

96) Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.

97) Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.

98) Omni Magazine.

99) A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.

100) When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same

90) A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).

 

Interesting. The short lived snickers marathon bars here in the US were energy bars. The chocolate chip ones were so good

Yeah, that is the first thing I thought of when reading it, I didn't even know they were called Marathon Bars in Britain

 

I remember back in the Commodore 64 days when the games were loaded on tape we'd copy them from our friends using a dual deck stereo. I was 7-8 when I was doing that. You could record over store bought tapes by taping the hole at the top.

11) MiniDisc.

12) Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.

 

 

Oh yes I knew someone who had these... was wonder of technology at the time, you can jump and run with minidisc and it doesn't really skip? Whoa!!

 

 

6) Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.

 

Yeah, the tv where you had to turn the knob to the right station ..and the the knob would invariably break and fall off, and you had to use pliers to change the channel, those pliers were to be set right by the tv at all times.

 

 

 

 

Watiing for the song to come on the radio to record it on your tape player... thinking you are a dj because you would hit play on both decks at once

 

 

 

not sure if it's worth the wait to load this fake nude britney spears picture..sure it's good fap material but it will take like a minute and a half.

 

 

 

 

your site @angelfire @ geocities @ cjb.cc seemed like 90% of user driven sites were hosted here around 99-01

 

 

 

First porn on kazaa - every file renamed and you could tell what video it was just by looking at the size. 80586kb? Oh that's that babysitter one.

 

 

3mb song = 15 mins

 

4mb song = 20 mins

 

 

Music collection was having 15 songs in your winamp playlist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Music collection was having 15 songs in your winamp playlist.

 

LOL....but you're only going back to the late '90s with this one.

 

Great thread....lot of nostalgia, especially with the computer/music stuff.

 

Computer wise, I could go on for days on that. I used to be so into it when it was hard and geeky to use computers.....now that it's so easy and advanced, I have no interest in tweaking/optimizing/etc. at all. I just get on to do what I gotta do and get off.

 

Just to show you how destitute computing used to be....circa 1991:

 

Our family computer was an 8088 XT, dual 5.25" low density floppy disk, no hard drive....you booted with DOS in drive A: and ran programs in drive B: (which is why your hard drive starts with drive C: for you young'ns ). We had the monochrome monitor....green text and colors.....would have killed for CGA/EGA/VGA, lol! People with money had VGA!!

 

I just wanted color to run games....

 

One day, we found this shareware program called Hercules Adapter that would allow you to run CGA programs by fooling the computer that you had a CGA card.

 

Eventually got a 30 megabyte hard drive and thought that was awesome.....got Stacker and doubled it to a whopping 60 MB.

 

This was the Great Depression of computing.

 

If someone showed us an Ipad in the early '90s we would have passed out.

 

BTW, someone told me a few years ago that somewhere in New Jersey there's an annual parking lot sale at some computer show where guys sell all these vintage computer parts....XT, 286, 386, CGA, EGA cards, etc. I know it sounds fuckin ridiculous to consider buying it, but for some of the old games we grew up on, not a bad deal for $60 to have your kick ass 386 gaming console to play Arkanoid, Pharaoh's Tomb and all the other games on 5.25" that just don't work with DOS emulators.

I just remembered my friend had a monitor that said "Low Radiation" ... I thought that was awesome at the time

 

 

Games, I remember my buddy had this awesome game where you had a sword and bad guys just came from the right and you could either stab or do super awesome spin move and chop off their heads. One time we killed everyone and didn't want to advance to the right because we had to eat. We left the game running for 20 mins came back and it was Armageddon, people falling from the sky, new strange monsters, warp speed, I think we glitched the tape or whatever the game was running off of.

 

 

 

Growing up my friend and I were the envy of the neighborhood because we had Commodore 64's and 3-4 games to play on them. In fact I think I still remember the command line to get most of the games to load...LOAD "*",8,1:RUN

Remember the "turbo" button? Take your 8mhz 286 and press turbo and it was now 16Mhz!!!! Then there was games that you had to run at 8 because the game ran too fast, or the new games that needed 16mhz but you would turn off turbo so you could beat a certain level .

 

My 286 with a 1200 baud modem. downloading games at night with friends, you would start downloading files from AOL chat rooms, and then hopefully it would finish by sometime the next day.

 

BBS, no not the wheels! All text where you had to dial into different numbers to get to different Bulletin boards?

 

I have completely forgot about a lot of these things until now.

I remember it took me 45 minutes to download my first mp3 from the Internet. It was Manu Chao-Bongo Bong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw5s3CB_1pE

 

Aqua - Back To The 80's

Remember the "turbo" button? Take your 8mhz 286 and press turbo and it was now 16Mhz!!!! Then there was games that you had to run at 8 because the game ran too fast, or the new games that needed 16mhz but you would turn off turbo so you could beat a certain level .

 

My 286 with a 1200 baud modem. downloading games at night with friends, you would start downloading files from AOL chat rooms, and then hopefully it would finish by sometime the next day.

 

BBS, no not the wheels! All text where you had to dial into different numbers to get to different Bulletin boards?

 

I have completely forgot about a lot of these things until now.

 

BBSs were where I tried to download games.....rarely had any success getting the good stuff. You had to actually contribute to get....couldn't just take.

BBSs were where I tried to download games.....rarely had any success getting the good stuff. You had to actually contribute to get....couldn't just take.

 

I used to get games from them all the time. I am pretty sure that's where I got the first Roger Wilco game.

101) Having your private information be secure

101) Having your private information be secure

 

 

50) Privacy